The amazing adventures of Doug Hughes

Posts tagged ‘Asking Good Questions’

This is an article I wrote for my Java class at The Iron Yard. It’s being published here with permission.

Getting help

Often you will run into problems where your debugging strategies just don’t give you anything useful to work with. In these cases, you have to turn to other resources.

Craft a good question

The first step in getting help is to figure out the correct question to ask. Vague questions don’t lead to specific answers.

Instead of saying “when I click this button, it doesn’t work,” explain what you hoped it would do and what it actually does. To do this, you have to understand what it is you’re actually trying to accomplish. It might be a surprise to realize that sometimes you don’t know this. (more…)